Appleby Talks Again (8 page)

“Nothing so drastic. But he was abominably burned. Or that was the story the world was asked to believe later. At the time, Morton was posted as missing, believed killed. No word of him came through, you see, as a POW or anything. Then the war ended, and suddenly there was this mutilated man with his story – his story of being Leonard Morton.

“There was nothing out of the way in it. He had baled out; every rag had been blasted or burned off him; and he had for a long time suffered a complete loss of memory. And now here he was back in England, proposing to claim quite a substantial fortune. But was he Morton?”

“If he wasn’t he had certainly
known
Morton – and known him as quite a young man, before the war started. There could, it seemed, be no doubt about that. If he was an impostor, he wasn’t impersonating a dead man whom he had met for the first time in a hospital or prison camp. But here certainty ended.”

Appleby paused at this to stare thoughtfully at the photograph, and a question occurred to me. “At which point did you come into the affair?”

“In the first few days. There was, you see, a time-element. For a reason I’ll presently explain, it was important that the truth should be got at quickly.

“Sooner or later, of course, it was bound to be got at – although a bold imposter might well persuade himself it wasn’t so. The claimant – as I suppose he should be called – hadn’t materialised miraculously on a frontier of post-war Germany. He had come out in a train, and the train had had a starting point, and so on. There existed, as you can guess, a highly efficient organisation for tackling just such problems, and there was little doubt that in the end the facts would be run to earth.”

“But meanwhile there was this time-element?”

“Precisely. Nearly everybody’s relations with Morton had been impersonal, as I’ve said. Or, if not impersonal, say professional. Schoolmasters, holiday tutors, trustees, executors, bankers – and so on. They could none of them be confident, one way or the other. Quite early on they got together and held a sort of committee of inquiry on the young man, with a fellow called Firth, who was senior trustee, in the chair.

“Well, the claimant did pretty well. When he realised that they conceived it their duty to question his identity, he behaved very much as the genuine man might have been expected to do – if the genuine man was a pretty decent and forbearing sort of fellow. They were impressed, but by no means convinced.

“And then the claimant sprang a bombshell. There was after all, it appeared, one highly personal relationship in his life. Shortly before that bombing trip he had met and become engaged to a young lady. He demanded to be confronted with her. And the young lady, when named, proved to be the only daughter of the occasion’s Grand Inquisitor.”

I stared. “Firth?”

Appleby nodded. “Just that. And that was where I came in. Miss Firth – at least according to her father’s idea of her – was a young person of an extremely delicate nervous constitution. And to be presented with a lover from the grave, and later see him unmasked as an impostor would be quite, quite fatal to her. So Firth came and besought me. Could I resolve the puzzle straight away or at least arrive at some confident opinion? I said I thought I could.”

“And you did?”

“Yes. Not in a fashion that would have had much value if presented as evidence in court. But at least it gave Firth confidence in choosing a line.

“I did a quick rake round photographers who might have had dealings with young Morton just before the war – and then some equally quick work in our own laboratories and files. When I met the young man – whose face was certainly sadly disfigured – I had a batch of portraits, including the one that you see hanging here. I asked him to find his own portrait. And he chose this one. I wonder whether you can see what that enabled me to infer?”

“I don’t know that I can.”

“I was able to tell Firth that the claimant was certainly genuine, and that his daughter might be brought along.”

This floored me completely. “My dear Appleby, I don’t see–”

“I realise you don’t. Imagine you’re a tailor, and try again.”

Inspiration came to me. “The button and buttonholes!”

Appleby was delighted. “Splendid! What is to be said about them?”

“They’re on the wrong side. The printing has been reversed.”

“Exactly. I found a photograph of Morton and had this reverse print prepared. The two looked substantially different, because human features are never symmetrical, and his were more irregular than most.
Both
prints were given him in the batch he was to sort through to find himself. You see what was involved?”

“I’m blessed if I do still.”

“If he chose the positive print, he was choosing a Leonard Morton he recognised from life. If he chose the negative print, he was choosing a Leonard Morton he had never seen –
except in a mirror
. That, you see, was how I knew that here was the genuine Morton. And so – after months of investigation – we were able to prove with legal certainty. It was quite a puzzle. But – as I said – the answer was in the negative.”

“A criminological museum ,” Sir John Appleby said, “ought to consist for the most part of objects that are quite startlingly macabre. But my own exhibits, as you see, are quite uniformly dull. Look at that old diary, for instance. Nothing could appear dimmer – in the strictest sense. And yet there is a decidedly queer yarn behind it.”

My eminent friend paused. “Now what – just at a glance – would you make of it?”

It didn’t seem intended – for the moment, at least – that I should pick the thing up, so I simply gave the covers the most penetrating scrutiny I could manage. “It’s for 1911,” I said.

Appleby laughed. “It certainly says that much in gold on the cover. So perhaps you’re right. Anything else?”

“It doesn’t appear to me to be a specially bound or got-up affair. I’d say it’s the sort of ready-printed, one-page-to-a-day, diary that you get from a stationer. No doubt such things were already manufactured long before 1911. But it looks good and expensive of its kind. Bought in Bond Street, in fact, in the old opulent days.”

“Just that.” And Appleby nodded. “Did you know that Ralph Dangerfield kept a diary?”

“The Edwardian playwright? I had no idea of it.”

“Well, he decidedly did. Dangerfield kept a scandalous and compromising diary.”

I’m bound to say that at this the faded volume lying before me took on considerable interest. “It’s well known,” I said, “that Dangerfield’s morals weren’t good.”

“That puts it mildly. He belonged to a fast and raffish set, and it seems that he had the thoroughly undesirable habit of writing up its intimate chronicles from day to day. There was a run of these diaries covering nearly twenty years.

“On the day that Dangerfield died, his mother, Lady Julia, made her way into his chambers in Jermyn Street and burned the lot. It was high-handed, illegal and thoroughly sensible. Everybody approved – and no end of people breathed more freely, too. But one volume escaped, since Dangerfield happened to have lent it to a crony. It was for 1911.”

I glanced at the diary again and wondered how it had come into my friend’s possession. “You say there is a queer yarn behind it,” I ventured. “Would there also be some queer yarns inside it?”

“You’ll know quite soon.” Appleby was quizzical. “Did you ever have a chance of viewing the Cinzano Collection?”

“Never. But I believe it was most remarkable.”

“In its limited field it was unique. Just why Sir Adrian Cinzano took to collecting literary rarities and curiosities nobody ever quite made out. He had made humble beginnings at it quite early in his career – not long after setting up his first little business on these shores – and eventually it became something of considerable interest and importance to the learned.

“Indeed it wasn’t merely the learned who were interested. To get the entrée to the Collection became rather fashionable. And Cinzano, who was immensely vain, exploited this quite a bit. He would give little dinner-parties, for instance, followed by a personally conducted tour. On one occasion – oddly enough – I was asked to one of these parties myself.”

Appleby now picked up Ralph Dangerfield’s diary. “And eventually we were shown this. Cinzano did what one might call quite a build-up before handing it round. First we were shown all the regular things – the rare first editions, the collections of letters by famous authors and artists and so on. But the great event was to be this wretched curiosity. Just how it came into Cinzano’s possession I never discovered. Part of his success consisted in a flair for picking things up in unobtrusive ways.

“Well, the big moment, such as it was, came. We were all, it seemed, to be allowed to edify ourselves by taking a quick peep at famous names in sundry intriguing and improper contexts. There was some to-do over impressing us with how very confidential it all was, and then Cinzano handed the diary to the lady of most consequence present.” Appleby paused. “Just as I now hand it to you.”

It was, I confess, with some curiosity that I took Ralph Dangerfield’s record of the year 1911 in my hands and opened it.Then I gave an exclamation of surprise. “But my dear Appleby, it’s a complete blank!”

“Not quite. Turn to the first of May.”

I did so. “There’s a cross in red ink.”

“Now try the first of June.”

“The same thing.” Then I gave another exclamation. “But the inside isn’t for 1911 at all. It’s for 1952.”

“Precisely. And it was in April 1952 that I attended Cinzano’s little party. It was all mildly alarming, was it not? The real diary had been filched from its covers. And what had been substituted appeared to be by way of a delicate intimation of certain dates on which there would be trouble brewing for somebody.”

“Blackmail?” I asked.

Appleby nodded. “There could be little doubt that the missing diary gave wonderful scope for just that. Our party broke up in some confusion, with Cinzano imploring everybody to keep mum. But of course the situation was altogether too interesting for that: and by the next day all London – by which I mean all fashionable London – had heard about it. And on the next day, too, I went back to call on Sir Adrian Cinzano in a professional way.”

“He had called in the police?”

“He had – and he was quite communicative on how he believed the thing to have happened. He hadn’t, it appeared, had the diary out for about a month – and on that occasion he had shown it to a small party of complete strangers.”

“Wasn’t that very rash?”

“It was both rash and most unusual. These people had been Americans – university professors, he rather thought – and they had presented a letter of introduction from Burcroft, the eminent poet. Burcroft died, you remember, in 1952, and this letter of introduction must have been about the last thing he wrote.

“Unfortunately Cinzano hadn’t preserved it, and there seemed no way of tracing his visitors. He agreed that the diary contained a great deal of scandal about bright young people of the Edwardian era, now in a respectable old age, which would be a gold mine to an unscrupulous person. It looked as if Society would just have to wait in some trepidation for the first of May.”

“What a baffling state of affairs!”

Appleby shook his head. “Not at all. It had, indeed, only one redeeming feature – that of a very tolerable lucidity.

“One circumstance struck me from the first. I’ve already mentioned it – the oddity of Cinzano having invited an unfashionable Assistant Commissioner of Police to what turned out to be so remarkable an occasion. It looked as if he wanted a witness who carried more weight than a lot of bored men and silly women. But there was something more remarkable than that. There was his claiming to have destroyed Burcroft’s letter of introduction.”

“I don’t see–”

“My dear chap, such an action ran dead counter to Cinzano’s every habit and instinct. He had been collecting the casual scribblings of the great for more than twenty years, and sedulously corresponding with many of them simply for the sake of filing their letters in his precious collection.”

“You mean that Cinzano himself–”

“Exactly. His business affairs had gone all wrong, and Ralph Dangerfield’s notorious chronicle of 1911 was by far his most promising gold-mine. But it would have been very risky to set up as a blackmailer under – you might say – his own name. So he staged that ingenious appearance of a theft.”

I stared at Appleby in astonishment. “And what happened in the end?”

“I persuaded him of the good sense of Lady Julia. In other words, I saw to it that he burned the miserable thing before my eyes. And I pocketed this blank diary. He was in no position to object.”

Tea had begun while a pale sunshine still sifted through the garden, and animation continued to be lent to the wintry scene by a group of children tirelessly tobogganing on the slopes beyond the village. But now, although the curtains had been drawn a full hour ago, our hostess’ tea equipage continued to hold its ground, with the firelight playing agreeably upon its miscellaneous china and silver. The Bishop was the occasion of its lingering. His interest in the handsome Georgian pot was other than merely aesthetic, for he continued to claim cup after cup with a pertinacity that would have done credit to Dr Johnson. And in the process – but this may have been only my fancy – his complexion changed slowly from ruddy to purple, as if he were concerned to achieve a tint answering harmoniously to the resplendent garments into which he would presently change for the purpose of transacting the serious business of the day.

Yet this business – both dinner itself and our leisured preparations for it – hovered still some time off, and it was possible to feel that a mildly empty interval confronted us. To disperse upon whatever occasions we might severally own – say to attend, as the phrase is, to our correspondence – would have been at so informal an hour, a course of things entirely natural. But in an unpretending country house, little frequented by the great, an ecclesiastical dignitary is a person of consequence; and it was our united sense that our hostess was not minded to a mere breaking apart and drifting away until the episcopal tea-cup had been definitely laid aside. And this was the exigency in which the young woman called Lady Appleby – the wife of an unobtrusive person who had been introduced to me as some kind of Assistant or Deputy Commissioner at Scotland Yard – produced her competition. She produced, that is to say, a weekly paper of the sixpenny species which she had evidently been turning over earlier in the day, together with the proposal that we should collectively endeavour to win the comfortable sum of three guineas.